“... Mark has chosen an appropriate patron saint, it would seem, since the original St Basil, an early Christian father, was a famous preacher, a believer in a community life of shared work, an advocate of taking religion into the city rather than privately out into desert places. So the original function of the Church as an institution is cunningly brought into ...”

“... vary.’ Consider my own country. The main proof that this lethal practice flourished here in pre-Christian times derives from the ancient Irish Laws which recognised and strove to regulate the rite of ‘fasting against a person of exalted state in order to enforce a claim against him’. This elegantly succinct definition I take from the long essay entitled ...”

“... old days. Erasmus was a keen observer who dispels illusions. This humanist dawn was no period of Christian love, of sweetly singing choirs (Erasmus loathed English Church music, anyway), or of healthy green lands in an ecologist’s dream. In his efforts to spread a scholarly Gospel, Erasmus met hostility and underwent much suffering. The Latin ...”

“... hours of walking round, revolved round one aspect of my reading – Rider Haggard, Coral Island, John Buchan, G.A. Henty, Captain Marryat, and Lancelyn Green’s version of Malory. In my fantasies I was either a chivalric knight riding in quest of adventure, or a young boy journeying in foreign parts: both these characters obeyed an ethos which, quite ...”

“... of Peter Pan. Unlike certain of his predecessors, Carpenter claims, J.M. Barrie distorted his Christian model satisfactorily, and provided for his readers an alternative source of numinous sensation. However, the case he makes out for admiring Barrie would seem to rest on his perception of the frightful play ‘on its deepest level’ as ‘a satire of ...”

“... them, politics was a matter of upholding ancient Catholic values, values which in the Church of John XXIII even the Pope had his doubts about. The Army was a threat to democratic government, not only because it had the force required to overthrow a civilian government, but because dialogue with it was impossible. Although highly-politicised, the generals ...”

“... the top of a double-decker bus in 1929. (He subsequently recorded with relish the pukka comment of John Buchan: ‘Most unfortunate fellow. Always fracturing his skull.’) But the brain-damage explanation for his becoming a Marxist, while perhaps acceptable at the height of the Cold War, may by now seem somewhat physiologically reductive, and alternative ...”

“... Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in brilliant emendations of the text of Aeschylus. In 1662 Richard Bentley, one of the greatest critical scholars, was born near ...”

“... but there is, as far as I know, no evidence for this. Of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II Laqueur can only comment that ‘the extent of Bulgarian involvement cannot be proven in a court of law,’ as if only an excess of legal fastidiousness – rather than a complete lack of evidence – stands in the way of our believing this ...”

“... polity which arose from the marriage in 1385 of Jogaila, the pagan Grand Duke of Lithuania, to the Christian princess Jadwiga, heiress to the Kingdom of Poland. Like the convergence of England and Scotland, but more slowly, this union of crowns developed into a royal and parliamentary union in which each partner – kingdom and grand duchy – kept much of its ...”

“... could be no doubt about his reverence for the Bible. To anyone wondering about the truest form of Christian worship, his advice was clear: ‘search the scriptures thy self,’ he said, with ‘constant meditation upon what thou readest, & earnest prayer to God to enlighten thine understanding’. He was convinced the Bible was, essentially, a sacred ...”

“... Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald – almost any actor who appeared in a John Hughes teen film qualified). The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and treating them as a floating soirée. It was cartoonish and unfair to most of the individuals ...”

“... time: Cyril Radcliffe served on the Boundary Commission for India, while the egregiously indolent John Sparrow would shortly be asked if he would provide a constitution for Pakistan, a request about which he made the characteristic observation, ‘Declined: too busy with my practice at Lincoln’s Inn.’ A fellow of an earlier generation, Viscount ...”

“... animals, but rather those active in international work, pre-eminently Oxfam but also War on Want, Christian Aid, Save the Children and a few others. Sasson has interesting things to say about the way in which these charities’ international aid projects came to affect social policy within Britain, but the voluntary sector tout court is not her subject. Once ...”

“... grew up in a working-class, largely Armenian quarter of Beirut, until his family was expelled by Christian militias at the beginning of the civil war in 1975. They resettled in the south, in the village near Tyre where his father had been born. Nasrallah shared his father’s admiration of the Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr, whose Movement of the Deprived ...”